Saturday, March 26, 2011

I’ve just emerged from the shower following an encounter with a masked intruder.

Not strictly true, as it happens, but read on.

When I’m not sticking my fingers together with glue, one of the fun things I like to do is to get as much soap in my eye while I’m showering. In the same way that coke snorters blast their nostrils in order to up their daily excitement count, so it goes with me and soap. I could slip, I could hit my head, I could die. It transforms a perfectly pedestrian activity into a potentially life-threatening ‘thrillsville-style’ one. And costs nothing.

So this morning, I went with Move #32: The Forehead Shower Gel And Accidental Lean Backwards Uh-Oh.

Lather seeped between my squinting eyelids. I reached out for the sponge tray, clung on. Call me a wuss, but I even affected a girly shriek like the woman in Psycho before she was Psychoed.

That’s when I saw him — the masked intruder!

Okay, so it was only a trio of maroon towels hung up on the rail, but for the splittest of split seconds, they appeared to me as a hooded villain in mid-creep, hungry for my blood, my entrails — maybe even my weird banana soap.

It’s times like these when I count myself fortunate that I never took up Kung Fu. Knee jerk Jackie Chan high kicks are inadvisable when all that separates you from your would-be assailant is a shower screen of solid glass.

Anyhow, this all got me to thinking. Of scenarios featuring multiple masked intruders.

Like an intruder, about to put on his mask, who is interrupted by a second masked intruder.

Or three masked intruders stopping off at the Masked Intruder Outfitters to claim refunds on their ill-fitting masks.

Or a reformed masked intruder who cracks while shopping in Asda and climbs into a freezer cabinet with a potato sack over his head.

(That last one wasn’t a multiple masked intruder scenario, but you get the general idea.)

So, as we warm ourselves up for this Thursday’s forthcoming Bumper Abysswinksback Third Bloggiversary Celebration (to which you must link with the fervour of Dale Winton having his toenails done, btw), I’m throwing the comments trail open to multiple masked intruder speculation.

If you’re a spammer, so much the better.

And if you don’t want to talk about masked intruders, there’s always soap.

Here at Whirl Towers, the preferred mode of staying trim is the Wii Fit.

When Girly of Whirly received one recently for her birthday, it took me half an hour of trilling my fingertips ineffectually atop its surface to realise it wasn’t an iPad.**

** When the iPad finally arrived, Son of Whirl broke it mistaking it for the Wii Fit.

Since then, it’s proved itself to be a godsend in the Overall Physical & Mental Improvement department — though we have lost the little red dot responsible for working out your centre of gravity a few times.

* Bumping the numbered balls to a total of ten via a series of Ooh Missus pelvic thrusts.

* Pretending to be Eddie the Eagle (lounge curtains closed for this one).

It’s a punishing schedule, I know, but I’m happy to report that thanks to Girly of Whirly sticking at it, I managed to lose 4 calories as I dozed upstairs from the vibrations shaking the house to its foundations.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

The octet of moles arranged themselves in a circle on the pulsating contraption’s rodent-shaped plates, eyeing one another with zealot finality.

A tentacle swooped overhead, and with a whirr and a buzz, a glut of sci-fi potentialities flickered into being as the contraption powered up to what its central dial reported was MAX.

One by one, the moles' innards slid from their skins and plopped into a central aperture where robot knives and forks plucked muscle from bone and sifted the various humours for ReSYK.

Octoalienthingy marvelled at his creation’s simplicity.

A dual quartet of pelts! Three trios of velvety skins and a matching pair! Whichever way he looked at them, laid out before him with a frisson of fried epidermis still sizzling from their bloodied bum holes, they were perfect for his needs on this night of all nights.

From the Visitroposcope, Girloctoalienthingy’s eyes seemed to gaze down on him longingly and he fancied one of them winked like a twinkling star.

Tonight they would dance, they would make love. Possibly even pull in a pizza.

He threw on his hat and cape then, one by one, slipped his spangly new moleskin mittens over the tips of his tentacles and oozed his dapper bulbousness into the depths.

Friday, March 18, 2011

You know when you’re momentarily airborne? For longer than you were expecting and much longer than is your custom? And you make it past the brief guffaw as your feet pedal at the air like 101 Hanna Barbera cartoon characters prior to some inevitable clifftop plummet? Only there is no plummet because you have to remain airborne somehow? And the whole Where The Hell Has Terra Firma Gone thing seems to go on for such a terribly long time you lose all sense of what ‘touching base’ may mean? But you know you have to try to touch base somehow for fear people might think you’re dead, or your blog will go mouldy (or worse) from neglect like a dead terrapin left out in the sun for a week?

That’s kind of where I’m at right at the moment — flying through the last few days of the 2010/11 cycle before the next onslaught of bold new hours equinoxes its load all over my sorry carcass.

My one consolation?

The Abysswinksback Three Year Bloggiversary flickers on the horizon with the bawdiness of a pirate ship fuelled by hi-grade rum and a single multiply buggered cockatiel.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

If there are circumstances and habits which bind us and confine our thinking, why also factor into the creativity conundrum an imaginary container it takes conscious effort from which to extricate ourselves?

The existence of “the box” is itself “the box”.

Too late to disinvent all these ludicrous flaps of phantom cardboard now, I suppose.

So I’m filling mine with frog-shaped cheese and Men from Mars and other illusory nonsense the better that I might speculate more freely.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

If anyone needed an indication of just how stupid I am* my advice would be to read on.

* without reviewing every post on this blog since April 1st 2008

The more I go on with this peculiar business of submitting material to literary agents, the more I’m convinced that the people accepting only paper queries, synopses and chapters are destined to be reincarnated as sorry individuals who mutter, “must have been something I did in a previous life”. Email is easier, quicker, cheaper, savvier — and heaps better for the environment.

That said, when it comes to editing stories and scripts, I much prefer having hard paper copies upon which to scribble, scrawl and correct myself to oblivion. It’s hard to see everything all at once on a computer screen and heaven help me if whimsy should demand I sketch a willy and balls in the margin.** Add to this the legitimacy of a Times or Courier font (“hey, this looks just like a real book!”) and a corrections blitz becomes almost impossible via a keyboard, I find. This kind of hardware is for fine tuning only, much later down the line.

** at the time of writing, FunneeKok Pro 1.9 is retailing at £29.99

Far better to curl up on a bed or settee with a wad of paragraphs and a stiff biro-shandy combo. Tick here, cross there, rewrite lines by the *************, until every amendment is ready to be struck to hard disk.

Sounds great — but this is where we come to the stupid bit.

Not all Documents To Be Edited are equal. Worse still, neither are Paragraphs Within Documents To Be Edited. Print out a ten page document and you could find yourself post-corrections holding pages that didn’t need touching. That’s when you think, “why, I could have got away with printing eight pages rather than ten if only I’d known...” quickly followed by “how wasteful and costly to the environment, not to mention my wallet...” and ultimately, “so next time round I’ll print everything out in 7pt — draft — to be extra-uberecowarrior.”

‘Next time’ in this particular instance was 5.45am this morning, in the 'fathoms deep angler fish' glow of my energy saving Uselessness Lamp.

I shan’t trouble you (or embarrass myself) with how long I persisted, believing I was “determined and tenacious”...

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

It’s been a while now since I rose like a butterfly and flapped my way out of my front door with a smile on my face (in spite of the coily proboscisy suck-up-the-nectar thing poking from my chops).

Maybe it’s been the unrelenting greyness, the unwelcome February agenda. Or maybe my matching Snuggli bedsocks and hat are too comforting, too hard to replace with their matching Worki-Work counterparts.

Without blowing my opposite of a trumpet, the way I’ve emerged from my bed these past few weeks has owed less to levity and potentially uplifting zest and everything to the plummet of a poisoned maggot from a rancid steak in a seedy restaurant.

Oh, how my Michelin hoops of pupe have rolled from the edge of the mattress — apart from the one time I went off at an angle and got suspended in mid-hoop like the coach in The Italian Job.

This morning, I’m happy to say I’ve made something of an improvement. Hobbling two or three yards and walking into a wall isn’t quite The Full Fritillary, I know, but neither is it Hapless Pupoid Limbo, so there’s hope for me yet.